The Twitter Trend We Need to Let Go Of

Wanting to express your opinion is a very human thing. And it is a basic human right: freedom of expression. All of us remember when News Channels opened in Pakistan like flowers in Spring. News was easily available, for sure, but another thing that was available everywhere was opinion. Every house had a favorite talk show at that point. But maybe it is a flaw of a society like ours that we don't know what to do with a right when we get it. Sure, we have freedom of expression but we haven't learned how to use them. Most of us lost interest in talk shows when we noticed that the hosts were discussing a topic for the sake of ratings and not for educating but are we any different from them?

There is a trend on Twitter that has disturbed me for as long as I can remember and that is everyone quoting an offensive or harsh tweet to voice their disapproval of that tweet. There is nothing wrong with raising your voice against hatred but there is something wrong there if you are promoting the hater while voicing your opinion. We give way too much exposure to a hateful tweet when the only thing it, and the user who posted that tweet, deserves is to get reported. Many people say the same thing again and again by quoting that tweet that it loses its meaning. And they get multiple retweets, those retweets help the hateful tweet or image in reaching to hundreds of people thus fulfilling the purpose of those who propagate hate in our society.

Solution:

We should never stop raising our voices against the wrong and hateful content but there are better ways of doing that. Instead of posting our opinion individually, we can retweet the tweet we agree with or maybe we can post our opinion without quoting the original tweet so we don't give it any exposure.

The best solution is to report the person who is posting hateful or offensive content. I may not be a part of one, but I have heard about RT groups and I think people should use them to report someone because if once in a while we can't get behind a good cause then maybe we need to reevaluate our lives.